I think his point is that while a 5% raise and 5% inflation should be a wash, since you now pay slightly more taxes than before your pay after taxes is slightly less value than before.
It's still very misleading to say "wage gains aren't good" though - the problem is not that you got a 5% raise, it's that inflation is 5% so you need a slightly-higher-than-inflation raise to keep up. If you didn't get a 5% raise you'd just be even worse off.
It’s too far to say that “”wage gains aren’t good”, but he makes a good point about wage increase, inflation, and tax brackets I hadn’t thought of before
I think it's a bit overblown personally, the percentage of tax you pay is not going to increase a notable amount even with 5% inflation and a 5% raise. The brackets also get adjusted every year, to account for his point.
1% inflation seems about right for the 2020->2021 tax year. Most indicators are lagging so if inflation started taking off during 2021 it wouldn't show up right away.
That shows nothing about the amount of the adjustment. Looking up last year's and running a few calculations, it appears to have been adjusted 1%! That's not adjusting for inflation. Not sure what it's adjusting for, but not inflation.
"This revenue procedure sets forth inflation-adjusted items for 2021 for various
provisions of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 (Code)"
It's states adjusting for inflation for the tax year beginning March 2021. The document came out in October 2020 when inflation was 1.2%, I'm not sure when they adjust it and you may disagree with the measure of inflation
It's still very misleading to say "wage gains aren't good" though - the problem is not that you got a 5% raise, it's that inflation is 5% so you need a slightly-higher-than-inflation raise to keep up. If you didn't get a 5% raise you'd just be even worse off.